NewSong: The Christmas Shoes

So this makes two weeks in a row for Lyrics, Weakly, thus making it the first time we’ve lived up to the pun in our name in a long, long time.

Let the throwing of confetti commence!

And what song is so remarkably bad that it got me to actually post something so soon? None other than the 2000 hit (#1 on the US adult contemporary chart!) “The Christmas Shoes”, by the Christian rock (ahem, sorry, make that “rock”) band NewSong, in which we learn that the way they perform music is by standing around, emotionless and impassive, while one of them sings the lyrics. (For some reason, incidentally the “the” in the song’s title annoys me. Well, actually, the entire song annoys me, so maybe that isn’t unexpected.)

(I would have done “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” this week, but let’s face it, that anthem to getting your date drunk for sexual purposes has already been taken down by lots of people, even in the line by line format that I use, so much that i wasn’t going to be able to add anything new. This one, though, is widely criticized for being schmaltzy, but i haven’t seen much talking about how utterly dumb the story is.)

And yes, i realize that a lot of people hate this song, but a lot of people love it—remember, this song was a #1 hit. Ponder, o ye mighty, and despair!

Because, as the ice piano plays, we learn that…

It was almost Christmas time, there I stood in another line

And, to be honest, it’s not a bad start. The song runs just short of five minutes long, so it makes sense that Eddie Carswell and Leonard Ahlstrom, the writers of the song, would give us the setting right at the outset: It’s nearly Christmas time (so mid- to late December, i’m thinking, especially given the next line), and the narrator of the song is standing in a line at a store somewhere.

Incidentally, it’s just too weird to talk about Messrs. Carswell and Ahlstrom when talking about the narrator of this song (since he refers to himself in the singular), and so since Mr. Ahlstrom had the good sense to bail on the band right about the time this song came out, for the rest of this entry i’m going to blame Mr. Carswell for it. (Besides, according to NewSong’s Wikipedia page Mr. Carswell was one of the founding members of the band, so without him the whole thing could never have taken place at all.)

So anyway—Mr. Carswell is standing in line. Why is he standing in line?

Trying to buy that last gift or two, not really in the Christmas mood

Yeah, i know how it goes—there’s always that one person on your list who’s just impossible to shop for, and then you have to wait in line to purchase whatever you end up choosing…It can be very non-fun.

Or you could just shop on Amazon. Not only would you not have to stand in line, you would have never experienced the events of this song, leading you to never have written it—a win for you, and a win for us!

Standing right in front of me was a little boy waiting anxiously
Pacing ’round like little boys do

Huh?

I mean, yeah, some folks pace, sure. But pacing ’round like little boys do implies that little boys pacing is something that all or nearly all little boys do.

Mr. Carswell, i don’t know about you, but i was once a little boy, and i didn’t pace. I fidgeted plenty, sure, but pacing? Nope—and i haven’t seen many little boys pace, especially not when standing in line at a store to buy something.

Basically, i’m suspecting you haven’t, you know, actually observed little boys in stores. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, it just leads to a bit of mental whiplash—and that doesn’t bode well when it comes in the fourth line of a five-minute song.

And in his hands he held a pair of shoes

This, at least, makes sense. Most places, you want to buy a pair of shoes, you carry ’em to the counter. So maybe Mr. Carswell does know something about normal people and the ways they shop.

His clothes were worn and old, he was dirty from head to toe

If you had the stomach to make it through the video for this song, you will perhaps have noticed how utterly clean and all-American wholesome the boy is (along with his whole family). Guess being dirty didn’t play well in Peoria.

And when it came his time to pay
I couldn’t believe what I heard him say

I’d be pretty thunderstruck, myself, since what the kid says is the chorus to a #1 song, and yet the rhyme scheme is totally messed up—and just so that you can get the whole horror of it, i’m going to show you the whole thing before i talk about it.

Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my Mama, please
It’s Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size
Could you hurry, sir, Daddy says there’s not much time
You see she’s been sick for quite a while
And I know these shoes would make her smile
And I want her to look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight

Okay, let’s take this piece by piece.

First of all: Kid wants to buy shoes for his mother. Not the usual sort of gift a kid gets for a parent, but he apparently did enough research to know what her shoe size is, so it all works.

We also find out that it’s Christmas Eve, which means that Mr. Carswell was stretching things a little when he said at the beginning of the song that it was almost Christmas time—sorry, dude, you procrastinated. Fortunately, you’re not alone in that.

The kid’s in a hurry, though—apparently his father told him there’s not much time. And not much time for what? wonders the naïve bystander, blissfully unaccustomed to such glurge…Well, i’ll tell you:

It’s DEATH!!1!1!!1!11!!

Yep, that’s right, this kid has gone to the store, away from his dying mama, so that he can buy her a pair of shoes that she can die in.

And not just a pair of shoes she can die in, but a pair of shoes that’ll make her look pretty for Jesus.

Okay, see, this is wrong on too many levels to list—but here’s my initial thoughts, in no particular order:

• Wasn’t one of Jesus’s big things that we shouldn’t cling too much to the things of this world, but that we should give to others? I mean, i guess that’s what the kid’s doing in some odd way, but someone with that philosophy probably isn’t going to be impressed by a pair of shoes, you know?
• At least, though, this vignette lets us know something about Mr. Carswell’s theology, which is that you can take it with you. (Or at least that you can take your shoes with you.)
• I know, it’s probably just me, but every time i hear this i get this image of people hanging out in heaven, wearing nothing but the shoes they died in and being really catty about them. “You mean you let yourself die while wearing those old things? How gauche!”

I mean, i’ve never died, and i’ve never even gone through a long sickness where it looked like i was going to die, but my suspicion is that if i ever am that sick, caring about shoes isn’t going to be at the top of my list, and i really hope it isn’t at the top of my kids’ lists.

But apparently that just makes me an evil heartless bastard who just doesn’t get The True Meaning of Christmas℠, as we’ll discover by the end of this song.

But that’s okay, ’cause even with his misplaced priorities, at least the kid has a plan, and maybe it’s done him good coming up with this, you know, to keep his mind off of impending death and all that.

He counted pennies for what seemed like years

Wait—he’s paying in pennies?!?

Then the cashier said, “Son, there’s not enough here”
He searched his pockets frantically

And so the kid didn’t have a plan? You mean he just left his dying mother to go shopping at the mall? You mean the whole buying shoes thing was an accident? What kind of psychopath-to-be is this child, anyway?

Then he turned and he looked at me

Because looking at the person behind you in line is what you does when you don’t have enough money to buy something, thought nobody ever.

He said Mama made Christmas good at our house
Though most years she just did without

Once again, the disjunction between the content of this song and the visuals of the video would amuse, if they weren’t quite so lame.

And really, what little kid actually speaks like this? I mean, really, read it as prose: Mama made Christmas good at our house, though most years she just did without. Now imagine it coming from the lips of a ragamuffin ten-year-old boy. Can’t do it, can you? That’s because actual real human kids don’t speak this way!

True story: This song was inspired by a chain email from back in the 90s called “Golden Slippers”. Yes, this song was based on an urban legend email hoax, so you know it must be quality!

Next week, NewSong releases a song about getting drunk with strangers and waking up with a missing kidney.

(At least in the original the kids wanted to buy their mother gold-colored shoes so they’d match the gold-paved streets of heaven. In this song, it’s all about being pretty for Jesus. I don’t like either sentiment, but if forced, i’ll admit to being more impressed behind the thought of the first one.)

Tell me Sir, what am I going to do,
Somehow I’ve got to buy her these Christmas shoes

See, if i’m the guy in the song, i’m thinking scam here. This kid just told an immensely improbable story about a dying mother who he’s abandoned to die on Christmas Eve so he can buy shoes for her, and i’m supposed to believe this? I know a setup when i hear it kid, get outta here before i call for security.

So I laid the money down, I just had to help him out

But Mr. Carswell is a more trusting sort than i am, so he pays for the shoes.

I’ll never forget the look on his face when he said
Mama’s gonna look so great

Especially since she just got her New Year’s Eve dancing shoes for free, just like mama told me it’d work!

And then we get the chorus again. Instead of making you read through it here, i’ll just note that this song (which, remember, was “inspired” by a chain email) itself led to both a book and a movie. Yes, that’s right, a full-length (made-for-TV) movie.

The current version of the movie’s Wikipedia page includes a plot synopsis, which gives names to the characters: the narrator of the song is named Robert, the little kid is named Nathan, and Nathan’s mother is Maggie. So various things happen and then Robert’s mother dies, after which Robert helps Nathan buy the shoes for Maggie, and then finally Maggie dies.

The end of the synopsis reads: The scene then cuts to the cemetery where Robert is visiting his mother’s grave, 17 years later. He runs into a young man wearing the same baseball cap Nathan had been wearing. After he leaves, Robert sees that the man had been visiting Maggie’s grave, and recognizes the shoes the man had left at the grave. Robert then realizes that the young man was Nathan.

This is even more disturbing than the song, ’cause it turns out that the kid never even gave the shoes to his mother—he just bought them to buy them!

(And “wearing the same baseball cap Nathan had been wearing” seventeen years earlier? I mean, i don’t even remember what my wife was wearing as we drove off from our wedding reception a bit less than seventeen years ago, and this guy recognizes a baseball cap?? I mean, i guess that makes sense, since no two baseball caps are alike, but it still rings a bit off to me.)

And now we’re at the bridge…

I knew I’d caught a glimpse of heaven’s love
As he thanked me and ran out

See, it’s lines like this that have contributed to the world’s oversupply of treacle, and until the situation is rectified there won’t be enough demand to bring back the treacle mines that produce the stuff us gourmands know to be the best, no matter how much cheaper the artificial mass-produced stuff is.

I’m just thinking the boy was glad he wasn’t going to have to end up giving his mother the hat he’d knitted for her.

I knew that God had sent that little boy
To remind me just what Christmas is all about

That’s right. God made the kid’s mom sick, and made sure the boy was poor and dirty (for the video, read: upper-middle-class—though out of money—and freshly scrubbed) enough to tug at your heartstrings, just so that you could learn The True Meaning of Christmas℠. Sorry, Mr. Carswell, but i’m thinking you’re not really that important, you know?

And then a children’s chorus kicks in to end the song with a repeat of the chorus. Seriously, by this point it doesn’t sound cute, it sounds like the kids’ voices in The Haunting.

(And i was going to repeat the chorus here just like it's done in the song, but i can’t bring myself to do it. Instead, enjoy a Christmas song with an uplifting message the way it should be done. See you next week.)

Natalie Imbruglia: Torn

If i wanted to, i could divide the songs that have been featured here on Lyrics, Weakly into a number of different categories: There are songs that could have been good, but the lyrics are so bad that it distracts from the music; there are songs that are just plain horrible, and the lyrics are badly done as part of the whole package; there are songs that you could argue i like precisely because the lyrics are so awful it makes for a so-bad-it’s good listening experience.

And then there are songs like today’s feature, Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”: Songs i like even though the lyrics are nonsensical enough that you would have thought it would result in me downgrading it.

I can’t explain why i like this song, unless it’s the result of context—it was released in 1997, which wasn’t really a good year for music. (You don’t believe me? Just consider one fact: The Spice Girls made Spice World that year. ’Nuff said.) So maybe it’s all wrapped up in the fact that this song stayed at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for eleven weeks, thereby reducing the number of times we all had to listen to “Wannabe” yet again.

But, like i said, the lyrics of the song leave a bit to be desired. Just listen:

I thought I saw a man brought to life

Methinks Ms Imbruglia spent too much time watching Frankenstein movies growing up.

He was warm
He came around
And he was dignified

Two things here.

First of all, if someone is alive, that person is generally warm, at least assuming you think 98.6 degrees fahrenheit/​37 celsius counts as warm. (If that doesn’t count as warm to you, though, i suggest you urge this man to seek medical attention quickly.)

Second, of course he’s dignified, as any fan of Gene Wilder and/or Peter Boyle could have told you.

He showed me what it was to cry

Maybe it just comes of being a parent, but i strongly suspect that no human needs to be shown how to cry.

Maybe Ms Imbruglia isn’t human? One might now suspect. Just sayin’.

Well you couldn’t be that man I adored
You don’t seem to know
Or seem to care
What your heart is for

Ooh! Ooh! I know what the heart is for! Do i get extra credit for that?

I don’t know him anymore

In all seriousness, i can’t figure out this particular lyric—Ms Imbruglia switches from second person (you) to third person (he) without a bit of warning. Is she complaining about us, and then suddenly switches to complaining about some guy she knows? ’Cause that’s what it sounds like, and to be quite honest, if she wants me to lend a sympathetic ear to her man troubles, she really oughtn’t lead into it by kvetching about me to my face.

Or, of course, it could simply be that she doesn’t understand human emotions, and this is actually the way they talk about such things on her home world.

There’s nothin’ where he used to lie

Um, that’s because he used to lie there. See? It’s in the past tense, which means it was like that at some point previous to the present. Further, the construction ‘used to’ means that the past-tense state or action is completed, meaning it doesn’t exist that way any more. Therefore, since he used to lie there, he no longer lies there. Glad to have been able to clear that up for you!

(Sometimes it’s good to have a professional linguist around to help out in such cases. Just doing my civic duty, folks, nothing more.)

My conversation has run dry
That’s what's going on
Nothing’s right

Might i suggest medical help, yet again?

I’m torn

Or, perhaps, medical attention for other symptoms?

I’m all out of faith

Well, on that one at least i suspect WebMD isn’t going to be much help.

This is how I feel
I’m cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor

If lying on the floor while naked makes you cold, it might be worth standing up, or at least lying on carpet rather than tile.

No, really, no need to thank me—just happy to help.

Illusion never changed
Into something real
I’m wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn

Normally, “torn” isn’t used to describe perfect things. So, then, if the sky is torn, it wouldn’t be perfect, right? So how can the perfect sky be torn? And if the sky was torn to any significant degree, wouldn’t we lose our atmosphere, which would mean that there was no sky at all?

In other news, this sentence is completely false.

You’re a little late
I’m already torn

You know, even taking this couplet as i’m pretty sure it was actually intended, being that torn up over someone being a little late seems like it’s kind of an extreme reaction. But maybe that’s just me.

So I guess the fortune teller’s right

Just wondering what would we do without YouTube to let us know how to gain access to such useful technologies?

(Alternatively, there’s this one, but it’s not entirely safe for work.)

I should have seen just what was there and not some holy light

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

But you crawled beneath my veins
And now, I don’t care
I have no luck
I don’t miss it all that much
There’s just so many things
That I can’t touch
I’m torn

Please see my previous comments about gaining information on treating medical "issues.

There’s nothin’ where he used to lie
My inspiration has run dry
That’s what’s going on
Nothing’s right
I’m torn

More depression.

Wow—this has really turned into a downer of a song. Therefore, i will leave you with something to lighten the mood.

The Shangri-Las: Leader of the Pack

So over here at Lyrics, Weakly central I’ve been hanging out in the 70s for the past few weeks, but today we’re going even further back—back to 1964, when the teen tragedy subgenre of doo-wop music was at its peak, shortly to give way to Beatlemania. And what better example of teen tragedy than the Shangri-Las’ #1 hit, “Leader of the Pack”?

If you’re not familiar with the song, it’s summarized rather neatly on its Wikipedia page. The summary doesn’t do the absolute incoherence of the story justice, though—for that you have to go to the lyrics themselves. So let’s do so, where we start with some forebodingly minor piano chords, leading into a conversation, presumably at the corner ice cream shop, or wherever it is well-groomed clean-cut white kids gathered back then.

(By the way, the narrator of this story is named Betty, and one of the singers in the Shangri-Las was Betty Weiss. I have no idea if she was the lead singer on this song—and what little i’ve been able to find seems to point to it being her sister, Mary Weiss—but i’m going to call her Betty just to make things easier for myself.)

Voice 1, spoken: Is she really going out with him?
Voice 2, spoken: Well, there she is. Let's ask her.
Voice 3, spoken: Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Betty, spoken: Mm-hmm.

So there’s the setup, with Betty wearing Jimmy’s ring. This apparently was a big deal back in the late 50s and early 60s—it meant that you were “going steady”—and the smugness in Betty’s closed-lips affirmative is palpable.

Voice 1, spoken: Gee, it must be great riding with him.

Her friends, naturally enough, are impressed. Not only does she have a boyfriend, he has a motorized conveyance (a motorcycle, as we find out later from the sound effects) with which he can drive her places.

What more could a middle-class girl want?

Voice 2, spoken: Is he picking you up after school today?

And he appears to no longer be in school. Betty done found herself an older guy!

Betty, spoken: Unh-unh.

And with this sad little verbal shake of the head, the first cracks in Betty’s absolutely wonderful world start to show.

You’d think that the response to such an answer would be “Really? Why not?” That’s what i’d ask, anyway—it would keep the flow of the conversation going. But Betty’s friends refuse to submit to such hidebound conventions.

Voices 1, 2, and 3, spoken: By the way, where’d you meet him?

They were hoping that Betty would give a simple answer like “At that bar in Chelsea” so that they can follow up with another non sequitur along the lines of “Incidentally, what color is his hair?” Instead, the singing starts. (I’ve put background vocals, done by the remaining three members of the group, in parentheses.)

I met him at the candy store.
He turned around and smiled at me.
You get the picture? (Spoken: Yes, we see.)

At the candy store? I’m imagining the candy store in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a bunch of ten-year-olds milling around and buying Wonka Bars while some motorcycle-riding tough guy tries to pick up any high school girls who accidentally walk in. Not that that would be remotely creepy, of course.

That’s when I fell for (the leader of the pack).

A guy looks at you in a candy store, you fall for him right away? I only hope he bought you the big box of chocolates.

But despite such an auspicious beginning, things aren’t all sex and cookies for the loving couple.

My folks were always putting him down (down, down).
They said he came from the wrong side of town.
(Whatcha mean when ya say that he came from the wrong side of town?)

Apparently Betty’s friends don’t understand certain common idioms used in the English language, so to answer them: It means that Jimmy resides in a section of the town that is generally associated with a lower socioeconomic class, or possibly even a criminal element.

In other words, Betty is calling her parents classist prigs—you know, Power to the People! and Down With the Man! and all that. Oh, and the main message of this song, too, which is True Love Starts in Candy Stores!

(And i’m not even going to mention the insanity of trying to fit the question into the meter of the song.)

They told me he was bad,
But I knew he was sad.
That’s why I fell for (the leader of the pack).

Okay, i realize this is being narrated by a teenage girl who’s recently had a pretty severe shock (as we find out later in the song), but that’s no excuse for this sort of narrative idiocy. I mean, let’s break this down, shall we?

First of all, being bad and being sad are not mutually exclusive, no matter what Betty seems to think.

Second, why would being sad be so utterly attractive? Really, i just don’t get it—“Oh, you look depressed, let’s go out” just isn’t the way my brain works. Apparently, though, Betty is made of sterner stuff than i am.

And finally, this is the second time it’s happened, but what’s up with the motorcycle revving here? There are some sound effects that make sense in the context of the story later in the song, but we’ve already established that Jimmy and his motorcycle aren’t coming to pick Betty up, so why are we hearing it now?

Speaking of the motorcycle sound effect, it was put to much better use on the Detergents’ parody of this song, “Leader of the Laundromat”.

One day my dad said, “Find someone new”.
I had to tell my Jimmy we’re through.

As the father of multiple daughters, part of me thinks that i should play this song to them over and over while they’re sleeping so as to subliminally convince them that if i disapprove of one of their boyfriends all i need to do is say “Find someone new” and they’ll break it off. They’d probably actually just laugh at me, but a man can dream, can’t he?

So anyway, Betty heeds her father’s advice, and so our good doormat protagonist goes to find Jimmy and break up with him. (My guess is that she just followed the sound of the gratuitous motorcycle.)

(Whatcha mean when ya say that ya better go find somebody new?)

Okay, the background singers maybe had an excuse not understanding the idiom they questioned earlier in the song, but this one just proves they’re being difficult.

He stood there and asked me why,
But all I could do was cry.

Besides, she realized how lame it would sound to say “Because my dad told me to.”

I’m sorry I hurt you (the leader of the pack).

The next bit is all spoken, for what it’s worth.

He sort of smiled and kissed me goodbye.
The tears were beginning to show.
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow

Twisted Sister, of all people, had the best treatment ever of the drove away on that rainy night line—look carefully at 2:04 in the linked video for the win!

Whether he heard, I’ll never know.

This is the big foreboding line—if the minor-key piano chords hadn’t clued you in already, now you know that something very, very bad is about to happen.

(No! No! No! No! No! No! No!)
Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!

This is accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle driving away and crashing, in case you still needed the tragedy of the moment pounded into your skull.

So Betty’s standing there in the rain, and Jimmy’s now dead. Pretty rough for her—so let’s go to her reaction (which is sung—the moment that’s so dreadful that it merits speaking is past).

I felt so helpless, what could I do,
Remembering all the things we’d been through.
In school they all stop and stare.
I can’t hide the tears, but I don’t care.
I’ll never forget him (the leader of the pack).

Pretty rough for her—except, um, back at the beginning of the song, she was so blasé about everything, that it kind of undercuts the pathos of the moment for me. I mean, i’ve never had a significant other die on me, but i’m pretty sure if someone asked me “Is [name of dead person] picking you up after school today?” i’d most likely do one of two things: Say “No, [name of dead person] is dead” or, probably more likely, burst into tears. (Maybe both.) Betty is apparently much more of a tough girl than i’ll ever be—she just responded back with a simple unh-unh.

Maybe she’s just in shock in the memory of all the things they’d been through—you know, all that stuff that took up so much of her time that her friends, um, had no idea whether she was dating Jimmy at all. Yeah, all those things they’d managed to go through in two hours spread over three days or so, apparently.

And yes, i do recognize that i overanalyze song lyrics. Still, i suspect that this bit of emotional inconsistency would really bother me even if i didn’t, and i figure i can’t be alone in that—can i?

And then, in case you didn’t get that Jimmy’s dead, we get the following on a repeat and fade:

(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!
(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!
(Gone!) The leader of the pack and now he’s gone (gone gone gone gone gone gone)!
The leader of the pack and now he’s gone!

Well, at least “Leader of the Pack” doesn’t have the utter sappiness of the whole class ring idiocy in Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel”—so we might as well take the small victories, right?

Starship: We Built This City

Rock and roll has a long tradition of self-referential songs. (The pinnacle, of course, was the song “Bad Company”, from the Bad Company album, by the band…erm, Bad Company.) Rock isn’t alone in this, of course—hip-hop does it even more, and blues has been steeped in the practice since before the era of recorded music.

So it comes as no surprise that twenty years after Jefferson Airplane was formed, Grace Slick and company, now working under the name Starship, decided that they were established enough to talk about how great they were. The best part of all this, perhaps, is that they did this in the mid–80s, which means they made a really, really stupid video for the song—and we should all be glad that they did, because if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have the opportunity to mock it.

True story: Back when i was in my late teens i went through a classic-rock period, which included, of course, getting heavily into classic Jefferson Airplane. During this time i insulted a friend terribly by telling her she looked like Grace Slick. Unfortunately, it took me quite literally years to figure out what i’d said wrong. Now, though, i understand—while my familiarity with Grace Slick was largely mid– to late–60s Grace Slick, her point of reference was mid– to late–80s Grace Slick. There is an important difference. (Oddly, mid– to late–00s Grace Slick has recovered some of her former attractiveness. Forget frying pans—maybe the visual history of Grace Slick is all that’s necessary to combat drug abuse.)

Further news: Blender magazine rated this song as the worst hit song ever. Probably overly harsh, but i can sympathize.

Anyway, with all that as background, let’s get to the lyrics.

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
We built this city on rock and roll

I really have to wonder what a city built on rock and roll would look like. In my observation, cities are generally built on foundations made of things like large rocks and reinforced cement pilings, with the occasional high-tech substrate thrown in (particularly in seismically active regions). All of these things share an important feature: They are solid materials.

Rock and roll, on the other hand, being sound waves, is not a solid material. I would expect, then, that a city built on rock and roll would be subject to sudden and calamitous collapse. Apparently not, though, since the good people of Starship built an entire city on the stuff, and it’s solid enough to sing about. All hail the genius of the firm of Baldwin, Slick, Thomas, Chaquico, and Sears, Architectural Partners! Take that, Frank Gehry!

Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place

Okay: I don’t know you, or recognize your face. Further, i don’t care who goes to that kind of place.

More seriously, these lines have nothing at all to do with the rest of the song. In fact, exactly what kind of place is “that” kind of place remains completely unanswered, which bothers me more than it probably should.

Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night

This song has so many idiocies in so little space, it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches for a blog like this one.

I mean, i can kind of understand knee deep in the hoopla—Starship was really, really good at self-promoting, they sold a bunch of albums, they sold out large arenas regularly, they were arguably the first big-name band to use the internet in any real way. So fine, that makes for an opaque but catchy self-reference, and i’m willing to give them a point for that. But then to follow it with sinking in your fight?!? That’s a pure non sequitur, and not in a good way. Sorry, you lose that point, and i’m going to have to take another one away for fear you’ll break it.

And the thing about runaways? I don’t have the strength to even start.

Marconi plays the mamba

This one line may be in the top five most mocked lyrics from the 80s—and for good reason.

I mean, so they bring up Guglielmo Marconi, widely thought to be the inventor of radio. (Not true, but he’s the one who figured out how to make it practical.) Fine—they’re singing about rock and roll (and building cities), so they reference the way most of us still listened to rock music in the dark age of 1985.

But the mamba?!? The mamba is a venomous snake, which means that if Marconi were alive enough to play the mamba, he’d be dead by the time he was done playing it. (I just got a brainflare of Zombie Marconi playing a guitar with a mamba as one of its strings, like in that episode of The Jackson 5ive where they go to London—see the bit starting at 3:24 in the linked video—and they have to get through…Sorry. I’ll move on to other things now.)

Anyway—maybe they originally had something more musical, like Marconi plays a samba, but then they realized Starship doesn’t play anything remotely like samba, so they changed it. Can’t use Marconi plays the conga, doesn’t rhyme, maybe bongos? No, still not. How about mambo? It’s a dance, and it more or less rhymes—yeah, i know, this isn’t a mambo, but it’s not like the kids pay attention to it. What? You mean you’re uncomfortable advertising competing styles of music, since this is an ode to rock and roll? Fine—how about mamba? It doesn’t rhyme, but it’s not some other style of music—so let’s go with that.

(By the way—one of my sisters plays the marimba. Beautiful-looking and beautiful-sounding instrument. Doesn’t fit thematically or metrically there, but at least it would have made more sense.)

Listen to the radio

Sadly, drawing Marconi’s name through the slime was done entirely to set up this line.

Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll!
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll
Built this city, we built this city on rock and roll

Yes, i remember perfectly well—you told me just a few lines ago.

Not that i believe you, but i certainly do remember.

Someone always playing corporation games
Who cares they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page

This is where Starship gets a little bit defensive and, perhaps not coincidentally, a little hypocritical.

First of all, there’s a bit of a whine here about how it’s not a big deal when names change. This from a band that had just changed its name (to Starship from Jefferson Starship) after some years before changing its name again (it was one of the bands to emerge directly from the ashes of Jefferson Airplane). So see that haters? Corporations do it all the time, so it’s no big deal!

But it’s not like we’re corporate or anything, even though we keep changing names just like a corporation! No, it’s the corporate types who try to keep us down, writing us off the page, calling us irresponsible. We just want to dance here, wherever here is! We’re cool, we’re with it. We’re, like, totally tubular and gnarly and those other words these crazy 80s kids use.

Bonus movie gambit: The 1978 film FM does a similar thing—it’s set up as a radio station standing up to The Man (big corporate ownership) and playing whatever it wants—but what it wants to play, apparently, is completely corporate mainstream rock of the late 70s. (And the movie completely ignores the existence of punk, which just makes it even sadder.)

Really, it doesn’t work—Starship, you weren’t fighting The Man in 1985, you were The Man. You had been assimilated at least a decade earlier. Just deal with it honorably, okay?

(Then we have some repetition of the stuff about Marconi and remembering, which i’ll skip.)

It’s just another Sunday in a tired old street
Police have got the choke hold
Ohhhhh and we just lost the beat

So are they saying that police violence is so commonplace in this tired old street that it’s “just” another day when it happens? Or are they saying that the peace of a Sunday has been shattered by the ultimate symbols of The Man? Or are they just spewing lines with no connection to anything, knowing that payola works and they’ll have a hit anyway?

I know my vote.

And the we just lost the beat bit would have been cool if they really had played some game with the rhythm of the song, maybe shifting the vocals just ahead of or behind the beat. Do they do this? Of course not! And why? Because that would be different, and different means you don’t get incessant airplay on the 50,000–watt stations.

Who counts the money underneath the bar
Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars

I would actually assume that the answers to these two questions are different. Either way, i’m willing to help those guitars get wrecked.

Also, if you listen to the song, the stress pattern on into our guitars is all wrong—for years i thought it was actually into parked guitars because even though the stress pattern is still wrong for that phrase, it’s not as bad.

Don’t tell us you need us, ’cause we’re the ship of fools

Don’t tell you i need you? Gladly.

And can i just say how happy i am that you called yourselves a ship of fools, so i don’t have to?

Looking for America, crawling through your schools

This is creepy. Nothin’ but creepy. I get an image of a drug-addled late–70s to mid–80s Grace Slick doing a belly-crawl along the linoleum floors of my old high school…Great, now i need some brain bleach.

Don't you remember

And then we go into a bizarre bit where there’s what sounds like a radio announcer talking about San Francisco (without naming it). Maybe it’s Marconi.

I listened primarily to Washington DC radio stations as a teenager, and they dubbed over that section so that it referred to DC. I was quite seriously surprised when I found out later that’s not the way it sounded on the album. I assume that other markets did the same thing.

Looking back on it, that’s actually kind of pathetic.

Anyway, then we get more about Marconi and the mamba, and (by my count) seventeen repetitions of some variant of the sentence “We built this city” Yes, that’s right—that phrase is now burrowed so deeply into your mind that it’ll take a listen to Benny Mardones’s “Into the Night” to get it out of there. Have fun!